It is halftime at Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. Today is the twelfth day of the giveaway and we got 12 more to go. We made lots of Ghacks visitors happy by sending them licenses to great commercial software products such as Kaspersky Internet Security 2009, Cyberlink PowerDVD08 or Bitdefender Total Security. TuneUp is a plugin (some call it extension) for the Apple iTunes software that is supplied as a free and a gold version. There are only two differences between those two versions of TuneUp which will be addressed later in the article.
Both versions of TuneUp are available for Microsoft Windows PCs and Apple Macintosh computers with the limitation that it is currently only working on Intel Based Mac’s running 10.5 or greater. Installation is uncomplicated and the TuneUp bar loads automatically the next time iTunes is started on the computer. The last step before the features can be used is the registration process which takes only a few seconds in iTunes.
TuneUp adds four options to iTunes: Cleaning mislabeled music, finding missing cover art, exploring music and concert notifications.
Adding Meta Tags:
The Clean tab makes TuneUp search for missing meta data in its database. This is simply done by dragging and dropping songs into the TuneUp sidebar. The songs will be analyzed automatically. TuneUp will divide hits into matches and likely matches. Matches have a success rate of 99% while likely matches are about 80-90% correct on average.
All missing metadata, including album art, will be added to the song or album. This tab also provides access to a save all button which is available in the matches and likely matches tab. It is for example possible to save all matches directly in one go and evaluate the likely matches before saving them separately.
Album Cover Art Finder:
TuneUp will automatically scan the iTunes library for songs or albums that are missing cover art and display possible hits in its sidebar. Four different possible images are shown for every album that is missing cover art and it is up to the user to pick the one that is fitting best. Impatient users can click on the Save All button to save all cover art automatically. This will automatically select the first match as the new cover art for the music.
This is a very convenient way of adding missing cover album art to a music collection. Users who do not rely solely on iTunes will be delighted to hear that the cover art is integrated into the music directly which makes it available to other applications as well.
Now Playing:
This combines music recommendations with videos taken directly from Youtube and other news about the song or artist. The videos play directly in iTunes and there are also links to buy merchandise, tickets or music.
Concerts:
This tab will inform the user about local concerts of bands that are in the music collection.
Finally the differences between TuneUp and TuneUp Gold. The free version of the iTunes plugin is limited to 50 cover arts and 500 song cleanups. That’s the only difference.
You can win a copy of TuneUp Gold with a comment on this article. Let us know what software you are currently using to play and manage your music.
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Christmas Giveaway: MediaMonkey Gold
Nice giveawy
nice giveaway, really useful
Ohh yes please… my itunes is a mess, lol! thanks xx
Very nice! I’ve heard of TuneUp but haven’t tried it out yet. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to break away from iTunes. Improved tagging and concert notifications are the two features I’d love to see in it.
I’m currently using GimmeSomeTune, which adds covers and lyrics to the songs played, but I have to get the names by hand, which with a collection of 70 GB in music is quite hard.
this sounds nice, but i listen to some pretty obscure music, not sure how well it would do. plus i like my cover art to be at least 700×700, and apps like this tend to go to Amazon and grab tiny thumbnails that look awful when you make Coverflow fullscreen :)
Seriously…would love to have copy of this software! Hope to win!
Garbanzo it was able to identify all but 2 songs that have not been tagged yet in my music collection out of 350 songs. While I’m not sure how obscure your music is I have to say that it identified some of the lesser known tracks of my collection perfectly.
I suggest you try out the free version to see how it works :)
TuneUp looks like to me a great tool to tune up my iTunes library What i still not understand or the added, before missing, cover album art is also possible to add (copy) to a different music collection from lets say Windows media player.
sounds like a very useful software extension for itunes. Didn’t knew about it, but after reading your description i will really love a licence for it, till then, i’m going to download the free version, for testing. Thanks Martin. :-)
looks good! i’m an audiophile, but i’ve never heard of this.
i basically use itunes and winamp to manage my music.
used tune up free–great stuff–and yes w/ pretty obscure music…mediamonkey has some pretty cool features to grab art too…love to have tuneup gold
Hey, I’dloove to score thegoldversion of this
! I’vebeenusingthefreeversionof thisonmyPCand I hadsignedupfornotificationonwhen itwouldbereleasedonMac.
I LOVE IT
The trial TuneUp is pretty cool, but definitely needs a more modern PC. UI doesn’t seem to matches iTunes or Windows. You’d think that they’d try to match iTunes.
I would love a full version just to see what it can do.
Would love to get a copy of this
sounds interesting…
This looks like it could save a lot of time for those album arts!
Clean all my library is a hard job.
itunes and winamp
Sounds ideal to sort out my library
itunes…meh
I love music ;-)
I use itunes and VLC and I would love a copy, thanks!
I now only use Itunes to manage my musiclibrary…
I would like to use this software!!
nice!
I am using realplayer now.
thanks.
I’d love this to fix all my album art…
Today’s the Day, I know it!
I always wanted this program but never had the money to shell out for it!
I currently use Foobar 2000 to play my music and Tag & Rename to edit my mp3 tags and add cover art.
I’m a big fan of MediaMonkey for some of the look-up functions, but I also like the ease of use for tagging and editing from Tag and Rename as well as TagScanner…
Especially since tagscanner is light on resources and very portable
I also use VLC and foobar2000 and yes, even WMP and iTunes of course!